Grass

In the thirties, marihuana was America’s greatest public enemy, owing to the unremitting energy of Harry J. Anslinger, the reactionary first head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The hysteria was even intensified by educational movies such as Reefer Madness, which compared drugs to hell, using a lot of rhetoric and as much nonsense, but which often had an adverse effect, because they showed youngsters enjoying themselves. In Grass, narrator Woody Harrelson gives a chronological and at times hilarious overview of the far-fetched reactions to the soothing plant, from the arrest of pot-smoker Robert Mitchum, via Reagan’s ‘Just say no’ campaign, to Bush’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ programme. The time when someone was sentenced to ten years in prison for possessing two joints, as remembered in John Lennon’s song ‘Ten for Two,’ is over; today, director Ron Mann is just angry about the billions of dollars that are vainly spent on fighting the ‘menace’ of marihuana.